South Africa has experienced high budget deficits accompanied by sluggish economic growth over the years. Fears mount that such a trend may worsen due to the advent of the Covid-19. Yet, the effect of budget deficit on economic growth remains one of the widely debated topics in economics. This...

Applications tend to ignore that measured TFP reflects the variation of output that cannot be explained by changes in inputs. Such a change is not necessarily technological, so measured TFP differences across firms are an amalgam of technological, efficiency and other differences in attributes,...

Applications tend to ignore that measured TFP reflects the variation of output that cannot be explained by changes in inputs. Such a change is not necessarily technological, so measured TFP differences across firms are an amalgam of technological, efficiency and other differences in attributes,...

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) accounts for a sizeable proportion of the income and growth differences across countries. Two challenges remain to researchers aiming to explain these differences: on the one hand, TFP growth is hard to measure; on the other hand, model uncertainty hampers...

This paper considers kernel-based nonparametric estimation of panel models using local linear least squares, when both the fixed individual effects and the time effects present. The marginal effect is of the main interest. A within-group type nonparametric estimator is developed, where the...

The goal of this paper is to apply the theory of the political Kuznets curve to Russia and reveal the key determinants of the probability of recent protests during 2011-2012 in the Russian regions. We apply the political Kuznets curve in the time and spatial dimensions, and find mixed evidence:...

This paper provides evidence on the links between financial deregulation and economic performance in a European context. Specifically, we study the relaxation of bank branching restrictions in Spain which triggered off a remarkable inter-regional expansion of savings banks which was coincidental...

The slope of the yield curve has been estimated using quarterly data on real GDP and the nominal spread is proxied by the difference in returns from the 10 year bond rate and the 90 day bill rate. The time-series analysis after unit root tests using stationary variables revealed that the yield...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

This paper develops a new index which provides early warning signals of a growth crisis in the event of large external shocks in low-income countries. Multivariate regression analysis and a univariate signaling approach are used to map information from a parsimonious set of underlying policy,...